Re: Proposal for face-to-face meetings and telecons in 2008

John,

thanks for highlighting the different options. However, I don't like the
idea of having only 2 meetings a year and having 2 calls a week.
Personally I'm quite happy with the 4 meetings a year + 1 call per week
schedule. For me it would be much harder to attend 2 calls a week than
to attend at least 3 of 4 meetings a year.

I do understand the reasons leading to disappointing F2F attendance. But
I think F2F meetings are crucial for acceleration and efficiency. From
my own humble F2F experience I can tell they are much more effective
than any number of phone calls.

You can read this as a vote against the suggestion to have two meetings
a year, but to have two calls a week. If it is really essential to
reduce the number of meetings (which I feel is wrong), having three
meetings a year and having a 90 minutes call per week would be ok for me.

Regards,
Uli.

John Boyer wrote:
> 
> We haven't had much of a chance to continue the discussion by email
> about how to increase attendance and participation in 2008, but we did
> begin to have some attractive ideas at the end of the last telecon that
> I would like to continue discussing tomorrow.
> 
> Here is a proposal based on the discuss:
> 
> **How about we have only two face to face meetings, but have two calls
> per week.**
> 
> There is an obvious benefit of *reducing the cost* of participation,
> which is important to the survival of smaller organizations and even
> important to those at larger organizations where approvals are hard to
> come by.
> 
> There is also the obvious benefit of *reducing the schedule upset to
> oneself and one's employer.*
> 
> However, I also think this will result in *significantly accelerated
> progress*.  It is hard to commit a large chunk of time to the group, so
> committing any time tends to get put off; indeed, the recent face to
> face attendance is really just one manifestation of this general point.
> 
> Having an extra hour *scheduled* in weekly would therefore accelerate us
> by quite a bit by giving us more time in increments that people can
> manage.  And if you have to miss the occasional call, it's not so bad as
> missing a whole face to face.
> 
> I also think it would be possible to *get people more engaged in doing
> at least one action item between the calls*.  And as people get better
> at doing action items, they become less of a bother because they can be
> done more quickly.
> 
> Here are a couple of logistical notes:
> 
> If this option is selected, I would think we should consider moving the
> Raleigh face to face out to May, then meet at the tech plenary in October.
> 
> If this option is selected, I would think the second call should take
> place during our old time on Thursday mornings (7am pacific, 10 eastern,
> etc.).  
> 
> If this option is selected, we may need the approval of a higher
> authority, such as the CEO of W3C.  I think it is quite unlikely we
> would have to recharter because we are holding telecons in lieu of face
> to face meetings.
> 
> Finally, note that I did also thinking of the alternative of going down
> to three meetings and having a 90 minute call.  But that alternative
> scores quite a bit lower on all of the above metrics.  It doesn't cut
> costs in half, it doesn't cut the big schedule upsets in half, and it
> doesn't do as good a job accelerating the group because we'd still be
> meeting only once weekly, so no chance to break it up and get people to
> do action items between the calls.
> 
> Please post your thoughts about this proposal.
> 
> Thanks,
> John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
> STSM: Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
> Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
> Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
> IBM Victoria Software Lab
> E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com  
> 
> Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
> 


-- 
Ulrich Nicolas Lissé

Received on Wednesday, 21 November 2007 10:44:41 UTC